Carmelo: The People’s Ballhog

Carmelo Anthony doesn’t play basketball anymore, which is funny to say because he’s one of the best to ever play a silly game where you throw a ball accurately into a ring for points. He is so good that he waged the sins of fame and arrogance and we (mostly) ain’t care cuz the ball looked pretty leaving his hands. It’s not a stretch to say Carmelo is one of the top “pure scorers” of all time. It’s not a stretch because this is the era of hyperbole and the only way to describe anything is to make it the best or worst of what existed in history.

So Carmelo has to rank in a lot of categories that have never been measured or mentioned before. He has a top 10 NBA don’t-give-a-fuck grin. He made the best under-the-rim dunks and layups ever. He was the best dribble-post-up player with love handles, inside the 16 foot painted area. Carmelo was the best all-time of getting into fights but not getting into fights really at all. Carmelo joins Walt Clyde Frazier on the NBA all-time hats team and all-time Bachelor Swag movements. Carmelo gives the best all-time nonchalant press answers in the middle of losing streaks.

”Ay yo P, they say I gotta come off the bench!” may go down as one of the best unintentional hubris revealing moments in NBA history. It’s right up there with “We talking ‘bout practice!” in its oblivious wrongness and misplaced passion. Carmelo will go down as one of the best one-and-done players in the era where pro basketball was too cowardly to topple the fraud that is the NCAA and their prohibition/extortion model for a uniquely long run owning slave labor. Melo obviously got paid to go to Syracuse through a check-endorser not named Jim Boeheim but that’s beside the point. During the time when it was against the rules for college players to take money for a monopoly that made obscene money, Carmelo won a championship as an “amateur” athlete.

Carmelo is the all-time greatest shooting small forward who didn’t pass. Bernard King be damned. Melo dropped 62 at the Garden and I remember that night like I remember my first break-up because they both rode my naïve presumptions of what could be rather than what was.

As we loaded up the bong, my best friend and I tuned to the Knicks channel, in the middle of any ol’ failed Knick season that characterized our lifetimes: these bums gone lose so at least make it entertaining. And that’s what Carmelo was, and what Clyde and Breen were, during the Melo Era. The pedantic pair scolded his every move, his every selfish look-away and brush-off, as if it were not the core of his game and his being. We also yelled at him, righteous bong smoke bonding us, and idle judgment our guide. In him, we saw ourselves. An eighties baby, a hood hero who made good. An Afro-Caribbean soul twin. Puerto Rico but also Brooklyn but also Baltimore and nevertheless a simple concept, a fused self.

So we’re chuckling over the bong and I think he has our screenplay open so we can pretend we’re working and I start to notice all of Melo’s shots are going in and they’re not touching rim and the net is snapping as the ball spins straight through. I notice he’s getting to the line and the same smooth motions repeat. The ball is his and he won’t let it go and they’re making music together so this must be what it was like when Tosh was first on tour and his guitar caught the crowd in a stoned moment that stole time. This was Method Man on stage during that Def Jam/Ruff Rydaz tour when he might’ve been the most charismatic performer in rap and Jay Z basically had to take notes and sit there silent until it was his turn. Melo is grooving like that. So between our Pablo Prigioni jokes and us decrying Mike D’Antoni’s peak mediocrity, we start watching Melo take over the planet that is The Garden. He must’ve had 37 at the half or something crazy and I’m going on about the time he scored 30 in a quarter in L.A. and how he’s better now and how this night is special because it actually doesn’t matter. Those are the best times for a Melo show, when nothing matters and he can be ballet and hip hop and Puerto Rico in his way. Mike Breen stops scolding him for long enough to watch and is all “you know, when he APPLIES HIMSELF, Clyde, he’s one of the best scorers this league has ever seen” and other dumb shit they allow white men in suits to say. And D’Antoni leaves him in the game, which is starting to look like a win, because the shots he’s taking (and making) are the kind that mark D’Antoni as a maestro and not an arbiter of controlled chaos. Melo is clicking. Melo is hitting. Melo can’t be stopped. And we are super high but we’re standing up because we’re in the manic part of the high that makes anything feel possible and the hyperbole still falls short of what a basketball player from Brooklyn is opening your mind to for a nanosecond. Is Melo a champion, we start to wonder and say aloud. Is Carmelo more than the idea of a ballin-ass samurai on a scoring mission? Again, we remember it doesn’t matter because we can love it and say we stumbled on to the channel, day and time when it was perfect to be a ballhog.